Erik Maier

• In any product search process, consumers encounter multiple products. In today's online retail eironment, such product encounters are increasingly serial, such that consumers review products back-to-back (e.g., through swiping in mobile apps). The present research shows that for the serial evaluation of products, the serial position matters through an interaction of a leadership bias, conceptual fluency and tedium. During a product search, evaluations follow an S-shaped pattern consisting of (1) a primacy phase of declining evaluations (caused by a leadership bias towards the first product), (2) a wear-in phase of increasing evaluations (caused by increasing conceptual fluency after a recognition of the shared attributes of the product category), and (3) a wear-out period of declining evaluations (caused by tedium). Ten empirical iestigations in an e-commerce setting granularly trace these three phases, establishing conceptually related overall boundary conditions (matching vs. searching products) and moderators (conditional vs. unconditional searching, product similarity, conceptual category knowledge, product image complexity) of the S-shaped pattern of serial product evaluations. "Keywords: serial evaluation, leadership effects, fluency, order effects, repeated exposure